Here's an article outlining some of the rights denied to American women until the 1970s. A number of women on this board remember those days. I do! We continue to fight for our rights today.

https://www.ranker.com/list/things-women-couldnt-do/lisa-waugh?

Remember it well. I was having lunch with a friend last week and we were expressing concern that the world was going back to our high school/college restrictions.

Man, that's awful, I knew about some of these on the list, but not all.

I did notice about the Jury, they said women were allowed to serve on the jury in utah beginning 1879. So they could do that, but they still can't be on the "jury" in mormon court as of today.

That list is still unrealistically optimistic.

Equality at work, guarantee that pregnancy won't derail a career, get paid maternity leave (without paying for it with lost promotions), refuse to be sexually harassed at work, etc., have at no point been uniformly available to American women. Not in the 1970s, not today.

Also, in Wisconsin’s upper peninsula, prior to 1987 women were not allowed to make left-turns unless accompanied by a licensed male driver

Please tell me you're joking

Moi, joking!!?



Okay, I think I was joking, but what if it were true!!

Reminds me of the old Shinto religion “advice” that you should be ‘this’ tall before trying to circumnavigate your boyfriend’s ‘neighborhood’, if you know your Shinto . . .

Wisconsin does not have an Upper Peninsula, although if you squint really hard, Door County or Bayfield might qualify.

Honorary Cheesehead status revoked. Cheeseheads have no sense of humor, which is kind of ironic considering the headgear.

Okay, okay!

Upper Peninsula of Michigan...

D'oh!

Even "inalienable rights" must be fought for and defended, because there are inevitably some actively trying to take those rights away.
'Do-gooders' who dogmatically know-what's-best-for-you (e.g. endeavoring to "protect" you) are especially egregious, because they're Righteous - and one only becomes Righteous by trading away some of one's humanity as the price of admission.
As a result these do not see the humanity in you; nor do they care.
Much easier to deal with the merely power-craving, because they're readily discerned.

Because of these, claiming & defending rights is continuous toil and is the circumstance for all of us.

And now we have whackos like Jacky Eubanks running for office in Michigan. I will let you google it and pick your own news outlet. I don't want to get on the wrong side of CZ.

I get a kick looking at old ads from the 50’s. How they sold stuff to women and how it would please her man is hilarious. The men were in charge in those days or at least they thought they were.

I remember when women couldn't pray im sacrament meeting nor hold a calling without her husbands approval.

Women couldn't sign contracts without their husband's permission until the early '70s.

My mother let in a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in 1970-71 right after my parents did fulblown chapter 7 bankruptcy and the guy sold her an encyclopedia set while my dad was at work. The guy took off downtown and cashed out the promissory note immediately afterwards sticking us with the payments (at the time, no 3-day change your mind waiting period on the sale), and blew up my dad when he came home. We lived only a few blocks from a brand new library.

Ha! My mom wore the pants. She did whatever the hell she wanted. She used to blast the church leaders all the time. I don't think we ever had a bishop she thought was good. Why she stayed in the church I have no idea. She didn't have much in common with most the ladies there and she blasted them too. My dad liked the church. He liked the social aspect of it.

Anyways we had to go to church when we were home but on vacation we never did and we ate out after church a lot. Sunday evening was spent at a restaurant somewhere. So I grew up in a pretty loose Mormon family.

Speaking of women's rights - Going back to the Roe V Wade discussion:

Article by Laurence Tribe in The Guardian (May 23):

“Don’t believe those who say ending Roe v Wade will leave society largely intact”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/23/roe-v-wade-abortion-laurence-tribe

Excerpts:

“If the high court adopts Alito’s draft opinion, it will be a legal tidal wave that sweeps away a swath of rights unlike anything America has ever seen.”

“The argument that “only” abortion is involved because Alito’s draft assures readers that the supreme court’s opinion won’t be treated as precedent for anything that doesn’t involve killing an unborn human is both profoundly insulting and manifestly misleading. It insults every sentient person by minimizing the significance of commandeering the bodies and lives of half the population – and re-inserting government power into every family. And it misleads every reader of Alito’s words by suggesting that a court has the power to shape how future lawmakers and judges will build on its decisions and the reasoning underlying them. Alito’s hollow promise brings to mind similar assurances in notorious cases like Bush v Gore, is inconsistent with how the judicial process works, and wouldn’t offer any solace to anyone who might become pregnant or whose miscarriage might be treated as a crime scene for police to investigate.

“…the constitutional foundation for the substantive “liberty” at stake in cases like Roe ... are almost universally accepted as real, although deep disagreements remain about whether, to what degree, and from what point in fetal development the protection of the unborn fetus can properly trump that liberty.

“…as Jamelle Bouie rightly observed, “equal standing is undermined and eroded when the state can effectively seize your person for its own ends – that is, when it can force you to give birth.”

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Scary when put that way, eh?

A spontaneous miscarriage possibly being "treated like a crime scene". Yikes.

I understand those who consider that an embryo is "an unborn human". As I've said, I'm in that crowd, not due to strict religious conviction but it's what I think and how I feel. The potential end result of an embryo maturing is a human baby.

But. As Tribe says: The question is at what point does the fetus trump a female's autonomy and liberty of choice?

And, do we want to give governments the power to usurp that freedom? If so, then it's not a universal, unlimited, everlasting freedom. The Pledge would have to be changed to "...liberty and justice for all [except when one party wants to deny autonomy to another party]".

Wow. That's a good article, from which I glean three points that are relevant to our recent discussions.

1) Note that Tribe indicates that the Alito draft opens the door to Congressional legislation banning abortion nationally. That's a point over which Henry Bemis and I have disagreed: Henry thinks Alito is returning the issue to the states whereas I think the language about returning the issue to the citizens' representatives includes their representatives in Washington. Tribe is apparently on my side.

2) Some people on this board assert that "conservative" justices don't conjure up rights not found in the constitution. Henry, for instance, tells us that "the right-wing justices by judicial philosophy follow the 'letter of the law.'" I replied by referring to the Lochner cases of the 1930s, in which a right-wing court conjured up all sorts of rights that had no basis in the constitution, thereby earning the uniform opprobrium of subsequent legal scholars left and right. It's gratifying to see Tribe devote several long paragraphs to those cases, reaching the conclusion that Alito represents the most egregious form of 1930s right-wing legal activism.

3) Tribe states unequivocally that the Alito draft would open the door to the prohibition of interracial marriage, gay marriage, contraception, and sodomy. For all those rights are based in the privacy decisions that Alito now denounces as unconstitutional. Assurances that the court would not go that far are, in Tribe's words, "cold comfort to the millions of people whose lives are profoundly affected by these shaky predictions."

The article hits the important points, most saliently the can of worms that this sort of judicial activism opens up. If you throw out stare decisis, the principle of precedent, then judges become unrestricted monarchs, able to reverse any decision by Congress or the president, voters' opinions be damned.

Welcome to our brave new world.

In some respects it almost alarms me more that the court let stand the Texas law allowing civil suits from disinterested parties against those women having abortions. So now we can sue people who do things we don't like (that don't affect us personally, or harm us personally?) This is beyond crazy. It opens the door to all kinds of nonsense.

To me, these are not the actions of a conservative court. These are the actions of a court in which the majority of justices have lost their minds.

This is an important point.

-The supreme court has opted to allow the privatization of the enforcement of law as a means of circumventing constitutional restraints on the power of state governments. That is indeed revolutionary, effectively gutting the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment.

There is, however an equally important observation.

-The supreme court allowed the state law to stand even while Roe remains the constitutional law of the land. The proper way to handle the matter, assuming Roe must go, would have been to stay the TX law, announce the rejection of Roe and the constitutional right to abortion, and then eliminate the injunction against TX. Allowing the state, any state, to enforce a law while that law is unconstitutional is profoundly disturbing.

This is very possibly the most activist court the United States has ever had. The implications are staggering.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The implications are staggering.

This is the part that all too many people miss. Until it's too late.

We have to think beyond the here and now, as well as the obvious.

Extrapolation is a useful skill to develop. To many, it doesn't come naturally.

it was my fault if I didn't satisfy my husband and he cheated. Mormon men (I'm sure not all) still think this way. I was surprised by the ages of those who think this way. I think a lot of men around my age think that way.

"When you drunkenly run a red light and kill a young couple, you also kill her lifetime of eggs and his lifetime of sperm ... and there should be consequences!!"

--Judic West, Victim of Drunken Consequences, in the first degree

So much potential for human life. So much to sue over.